Do you know if you are able to walk around Percy before you go into the sorting? Would be really nice to not have to waste over a minute in the Great Hall.
I did try that. Using cheats and changing 0x0328 in WRAM to skip Percy, I found out while the shortcuts work and the students all hang around, the game won't proceed; Peeves won't appear at the first floor and talking to the fat lady at the 7th floor does nothing.
On an unrelated note, since I know completing certain objectives gives card combinations, I compiled a list of said objectives that do (in images):
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-2O13fpsnI4bjRyU291N09ralk&usp=sharing
Number 6 - 23 gives new card combinations from the kid at the 5th floor stoor. I have not checked if it's the same regardless of initial deck, but I do know that number 23 (Harry Potter card and combo) only appears if Gryffindor wins. It's handed to you as well, costing time. I believe this may mean that it's faster in an any% for Gryffindor to lose, but I need to check just in case.
Finally 4 minor glitches:
1. The owl minigame, just like chasing Malfoy, can be lost and still count as "won".
2. The owl minigame is always during the day, even if you entered it during night right after the forbidden forest.
3. After leaving the forbidden forest, if you death warp then go downstairs, McGonagall will walk up towards you, then walk back down for no reason.
4. You can farm an infinite amount of house points really slowly. During Snape's class, obtain a pair of fangs, then go to Hagrid's Hut. After the dialogue, immediately leave and head to the Greenhouse. Talk to the teacher outside about capturing snakes, and she'll give you 1 house point. Go back to Hagrid's Hut and repeat above. Very terrible method, and not worth the time.
@arandomgameTASer
And what would your justification be for the 3 minute spider man run? I checked both the comments and the past revisions of the submission; your intention was:
But for a TAS whose intention is to go as fast as possible, why should I deliberately go slower just to satisfy an archaic guideline? That's literally the exact opposite of my goal.
In other words, saving frames justifies more so than anything else (or what I interpret). This has nothing to do with only the Jedi; you've been doing this for other games.
Warp wrote:
It's not impressive to beat the computer at its weakest. It's impressive to beat it at its best.
I'm not sure if this was addressed, but regarding this from the guidelines:
Good reasons to use easier difficulties are:
More health for damage boosts
Less enemies leading to less lag
Faster bossfights on repetitive bosses, especially if their lower health can lead them to be one-cycled
I just realized 1 problem. This does not take account into the movie's actual end length. For example, this recent submission actually has the last point "apply", except the fact it's only 3 minutes long overall. Does that justify using easy mode? It's not some half hour TAS either, so imo it's rather hard to sell the last point. But hey, if someone had a really short attention span, they might think so. What do?
I'm not sure if it's only for my computer, but for BizHawk 1.11.5 it displays nothing for a certain watch file despite displaying something earlier.
1. Open Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone (U) (M13) [C][!].gbc
2. Open the current TAS
3. Drag this watch file into the emulator
4. Close the RAM Watch window
5. Stop the movie
6. Drag the watch file above to the emulator again.
Step 3 should look like:
http://i.imgur.com/4MnBHkB.png
Step 6 looks like this:
http://i.imgur.com/iJKYmWo.png
despite being the same watch file. Also it crashes BizHawk 1.11.4 instead at step 6.
I'm using Windows 10 Home in case that's needed.
I'm tempted to simply say "make a new category for easy mode", but then problems such as it being exactly the same for all speedrun purposes, being slower than Hard, or sometimes even be quite different looking to the point of new routes makes this rather hard. The former 2 points even more so, since it's not something one can easily find by looking at game values.
http://imgur.com/3whOcPa
Example Floor 1 Hallway map. I'm not sure if this would end up being too cluttered with labels, but it would be harder to navigate without those as reference.
Labels use names taken from the "Cheat Mode" menu.
Sorry for double posting, but since this isn't exactly related to my previous post:
I just realized 1 problem with this. Certain games already have communities and all with runs of different difficulties. Since there's no branch for difficulties, I'm not sure how happy others would be when they see the TAS thinking it massively beaten a world record, just to find out the improvement is a lot less because of a completely different difficulty.
I can't think of a vault game with a very dedicated community yet, but I'm aware for example, the EASY difficulty for Resident Evil 4 is like 30 minutes long. lol
You might argue that it won't apply since it's moon tier, but that was an example; I'm positive there will eventually be some vault tier game with this drastic difference and have some dedicated community.
I disagree with two things here:
- Vault movies should be on Easy, no questions asked. The Vault already allows speed/entertainment tradeoffs, so a major one that is used across all tiers shouldn't be deprecated so quickly. Also I fear it opens the door to a lot of cheap improvements and ignores the fact that some Vault movies are not doomed to be there forever. I also believe the Vault itself is kind of outdated, so I'd rather not have runs that are, for lack of a better term, specificially identifiable as "Vault movies" if the concept is ever changed up.
I'm pretty positive I know of a game where "Easy" is funnily slower; it's not publishable by itself, but pretty much almost all games in game and watch gallery 4 are faster in Hard simply because things move faster.
Also, while this sounds fine-ish, I'm not sure of how well it would end up being, since for example, " Stuart Little: The Journey Home" GBC has a different layout on easy difficulty. The stages are the same, but the location of what to grab, and the driving stages have different obstacles. I feel like this would lead to people demanding more branches despite both (likely) being vault.
Edit: Should this be polled?
I know 2 oddities not mentioned in the first page:
1. The hardest difficulty is literally impossible for progress; the game softlocks or has something preventing progress. Example: SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis GBA where at legendary difficulty (1 difficulty higher than the TAS) has the first minigame section softlock. Also the Star Mode in Game & Watch Gallery 4 is the hardest difficulty, but does not give stars (which are needed to see the credits)
2. Region differences akin to difficulties - Mario & Luigi comes to mind regarding how (J)/(E) version has different HP, and even though technically in a normal playthrough it wouldn't really matter since you'll be at a high level, in a TAS you're very underleveled, so there's that. And in this case it also drastically affects entertainment, since the boss fights are really really long. x.x
For the RAM Watch window, if "Always on Top" is selected, when I poke or try to edit the address/values, can it be made so that it will make the new window go above it? Right now, the window goes behind the RAM Watch with this option, and it's not possible to click on the RAM Watch again since said window prevents it.
Huh. Completely unrelated to this game, but I wonder does the difference between stella and AtariHawk also affect other games? I recall 2 incidences of AtariHawk being different:
River Raid:
A commented disassembly by Thomas Jentzsch was helpful in figuring out how to manipulate enemy movements. Not sure why, but the memory addresses in the source don't match what's used in the emulator.
Is there any method to determine which emulator is correct (or both wrong)? I'm not even sure if having an actual console would help unless there's a way to dump the memory during runtime.
Edit: Also, not sure what to think of the situation where "Hard Mode" is selected, but the game treats as Easy. Is there some precedent for this? What should it even be categorized if it turns out to be legit?
if can help you there was a guy playing around memory stuff in the game.
Harry potter stuff
btw, you think is possible to skip the minigames?
I'm aware of that, but thanks. Also, after messing around with the frog, I believe the glitched item is actually a drop from it. When it appears, it will say it gave a card drop, but sometimes rather than a card, it gives that item.
Also the glitched item's effects and text changes during battle by opening the items menu, closing then reopening.
Edit: I managed to exit battle by changing the game state to 0xF once, but it wasn't recorded. :/
Edit2: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/28845501770730507Link to video
:)
Anyone good at GBC debugging? I'm trying (and failing) to figure out how does it affect the address FFD2 to change the game state during battle. Please help.
Edit: If anyone cares, maps are done up to everything from Diagon Alley area (including shops without items), Pre-Hogwarts areas (dungeons and train), Hogwarts ground floor area (including potions/secret dungeon) and Outside Hogwarts (including entire Forbidden Forest, Hagrid's Hut, Greenrooms). Links are the same google one as before.
Finally watched it. That was quite boring. The only saving grace outside the music was the fact you managed to show that leaving a game filled with intentional bugs to appeal to speedrunning would still end up somewhat futile. lol
Actually now that I think about it, is there some RTS-friendly way to do something similar?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JqcTqljPon_bStQe32S7LKRxshu37ZybB74w_6WKxuE/edit?usp=sharing
Same document as before, but this time, I color coded the card group names using the same color as the background in game. Also I added a sheet for the Foilio Triplicus. It turns out Leopoldina Smethwyck, Hengist of Woodcroft, and Montague Knightley are never used in any combo. :P
I also noted down every card the combos use, and which cards they destroy. I'm not sure how useful that might be, but just in case I guess.
Bit 0 is far right bit, and 7 is far left.
Would it be a bit faster to use flowers for a bit before they start having longer/multiple attacks at low health then switch to pocket chomps? Pocket chomps don't seem to deal much damage for each individual attacks.
Finally, at low levels, will using those pepper actually do much at all?
In my opinion, this TAS is another (see: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17149) example in which restringing TASing to the hardest difficult is pointless. The difficulty in this game is just about how fast the ball moves, which, in a real time play, forces the player to have better reflexes to defend oneself from a score.
This TAS doesn't even include reflexes, so there is no reason to use the hardest difficulty. It wouldn't interfere in the 'gameplay'. The reason I didn't use it is just because it lets me with a worse RNG and I would need a couple extra frames to luck manipulate.
Well, one can argue it technically reaches the ending "sooner" in terms of actual time because of a faster ball, so there's that.
This run was performed on a "fresh" ROM, which requires you to watch a cutscene upon powering-on. A used ROM can skip this cutscene, but I opted to keep it in to avoid possible de-syncing.
The game emulates well using the Glide64 plugin (mark 2 used here) but it still has significantly less lag than a console, so a direct time comparison is not accurate of gameplay. This can be observed in the first level, where the TAS completes it in ~2:50, but the best RTA time is ~3:01. Actual gameplay
Most "cutscene skips" involve transitioning into an animal (either from Evo or from a different animal) as a cutscene starts. The cutscene still plays, but you retain control of your animal where normally you do not.
Are you sure its the ROM, or some other weird save mechanic? 0_o
I thought ROM was read only memory, so how does using it change it?
In terms of text, pretty sure all versions are the same. I used J because of the lower boss health, but recently found that the Europe version has the same stats as J as well as English text, so I'll use that from now on. Although the title screen is 75 frames faster on J than the other versions, lol.
For text I alternate button presses every frame (ABABABAB) since ABXY all advance text. Don't see how that can be optimized further.
9:11 is unoptimized for sure. I hardly knew anything about movement at the time. Bowser's castle is when I really learned how to optimize movement.
The transitions are an encode problem, I'm not sure how to fix it. It looks fine in the emulator.
For some reason Boos notice you from a greater distance if you move diagonally. So I moved orthogonally a bit to help avoid them. I haven't noticed this behavior with any other enemies.
In the fireball thing I moved the adults to minimize the camera scrolling time.
From my minimal testing of lucky hit manipulation, it takes on average a few thousand frames to manipulate a lucky hit. If there was a quicker way, then I'd love to make every hit lucky. Not only would it save minutes, it would really simplify the item route.
The crits on the shroobers are only because they are weak to ice. Lucky hits are RNG, crits are elemental and guaranteed if you use the right item. It is possible to get lucky and crit and it does a lot of damage:
(Sunnycide is weak to fire when he is knocked down, but it takes too long to knock him down to be useful.)
What's the best place to upload input files?
Wow..never knew about the item weakness :o
You can use http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/my#uploadfile for WIPs.
Also speaking of item route, you'll be vastly underlevelled for future bosses. Will it be flowers all the way, or would other items be better?
(Sunnycide is weak to fire when he is knocked down, but it takes too long to knock him down to be useful.) What's the best place to upload input files?
